dtSearch Beta Improves PDF Search Highlighting, Eliminates Plug-in Need
dtSearch has announced version 2026.01 beta which simplifies how users see highlighted search results in PDF files. The new release eliminates the need for a separate PDF highlighter plug-in, a change that applies to dtSearch’s enterprise and developer products, including SDKs for Windows, Linux, and macOS. These products search terabytes of mixed online and offline data instantly, running on premises or in the cloud, such as Azure or AWS.
The main feature of the new version is improved PDF highlighting. The new process highlights search priorities by adding annotations directly to the PDF file. This means that PDF files now work like other supported data types—such as Microsoft Office files and e-mails with attachments—displaying files with a multicolored hit highlighted to any number of concurrent users.
dtSearch owner David Thede told SD Times in an interview that the old way of using the Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in is becoming obsolete in the browser environment. The new method provides a much cleaner way for people to add PDF highlighting to their applications. Thede explained how the system changed: “The key to getting that work is that we needed to be able to add highlights as annotations to the pdf file, so instead of generating html from the pdf, we take an existing pdf and attach annotations to it, and render that.”
In the new version, dtSearch has a way to work with browsers that use the open source pdf.js project, Thede said. The Firefox browser, like most browsers, has JavaScript-based PDF viewers based on that project. So, to our dtSearch desktop product we can embed a viewer window with pdf.js which is used to display the pdf file. We can do hit navigation and hit highlighting on top of that, but we can do it for our web-based products as well. “
dtSearch products include a Terabyte Indexer that can index terabytes of text from multiple sources, including nested emails and Internet data. Indexed searches are often instantaneous, even when combining terabytes of data with fellow users. The product line offers more than 25 search features, including full-text and metadata options. It supports Unicode in hundreds of international languages and offers options focused on forensics. SDKs are available for C++, Java, and .NET APIs, and support databases such as SQL and NoSQL.
Thede emphasized the value of the new PDF feature. He said, “Being able to highlight hits in PDF files after a search is a great thing to do, because PDF is widely used”. He noted that this saves a lot of time for professionals, such as lawyers who review long documents1
Regarding AI integration, Thede confirmed that dtSearch does not include AI in its products. He noted that this decision is related to customer security: “Our customers are usually institutions that are very concerned about confidentiality”. However, Thede added that dtSearch plans to look into ways to give users tools to connect their search results with AI if they choose to do so.
